The Lodge of the Sage Knight

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"The first, and irreparable, disaster was the fall of the Lantern."

- E. M. Forster, Alexandria, 1922

BOOK OF HOURS

🔮 Alexis has been working on the 'Wisdom Page', BOOK OF HOURS's take on skill trees. See above for a mechanical mock-up! Censored, for the Suppression Bureau.
👨‍💻 Alexis goes into a lot more depth on skill trees in our latest sprint update, Leuven.
👁️‍🗨️ Alexis also wrote a detailed linguistic run-through of languages in games, particularly BOOK OF HOURS.
🤫 Make sure to wishlist and follow us on Steam!

QUICK LINKS

🎲 Our upcoming TRPG, The Lady Afterwards, continues development. Final character sheets, mailer boxes, QR codes and more.
✍ I wrote about Tim Sweeney trembling lustily, in a Steam v. Epic blog called "Trouble in the North".
💔 More seriously, I also wrote about loving a person with depression in "Living With Depression That Isn't Yours". This probably applies to a significant portion of this mailing list.
🌞 It's the STEAM SUMMER SALE everyone's been waiting for! Cultist Simulator and all DLC are 40% off, and the Anthology Edition is extremely good value.
😎 If anti-DRM is your thing, we're *also* in the GOG Summer Sale!
🦴 New Skeleton Songs: "An Early Symptom of Schizophrenia", all about apophenia.

NOOK OF SPOOK: THE ORPHIC EGG

The Orphic Egg is a primordial, hermaphroditic cosmic egg from the delightfully bizarre Orphic tradition. The imagery of a world birthed from an egg is common through several early religions, but the Orphic specifics are particularly weird. Chronos, who sort of is the first god really, but also isn't because he's not 'expressible and acceptable to human ears', actually makes the silvery Orphic Egg. But it's Phanes, a gold-winged, androgynous creature of light, who cracks out of it and does everything else.

According to the third-century Orphic Hymns, the upper part of the Egg became heaven and the lower part became earth, and Phanes (a bit of a Prometheus / Lucifer figure) brought light and knowledge and life to this new world. Phanes is also sort of Dionysius, whose life and suffering form the majority of Orphic mythology. As such, Phanes/Dionysius is later dismembered, boiled in a kettle AND roasted on a spit by some Titans, before Athena rescues his still-beating heart and he's brought back to life by Zeus. But, you know. You can't make a myth without breaking some eggs.

READING REC: AGAINST WORLDBUILDING

I know, I know. Using our own mailing list to sell our own book. Have we no shame? My answer is: no, and also the book is actually quite good.

Alexis has been in games for over a decade and has been around the block. He's written about everything from narrative design to postmortems to games he's made up after too many gins. He also gets cross about 'worldbuilding', which I think he considers like painting the Mona Lisa by first carving a lady's face out of a potato. A fair analogy? You decide.